I am an amateur astronomer and astrophotographer from Madison, Wisconsin. I’ve loved astronomy my whole life, though I never even considered pursuing it as a hobby (beyond looking up at the stars and constellations with my naked eyes) because I always assumed that it was only possible to see deep sky objects and even the planets with an observatory grade telescope and extremely dark skies.
That changed one night in October 2024 when I was reading news stories about comet C/2023 A3, better known by the name Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS. It was supposedly visible to the naked eye in dark sky locations and could be captured with long-ish camera exposures from light polluted locations. Assuming it was an impossible task and that I was looking at sure disappointment, I had the wild idea to go outside my suburban home with my smartphone, hold it up with just my hands (i.e., no tripod or sturdy structure to place it on) to the western sky, and pressed the button for a (Night Sight) exposure of 6 seconds…
Especially now with so much more knowledge and experience, I will be first to admit that that picture is not even remotely good from a technical point of view – for starters, the framing is poor and the image is blurry. But I was and still am absolutely blown away that I was able to capture the comet with just my smart phone, the most basic of astrophotography equipment one can possibly have. To this day, despite taking quite a few excellent astrophotography images, this one remains my favorite astrophotography image I’ve ever taken because of what it means to me.
I spent the rest of the night reading everything I could find about the comet’s characteristics: it’s velocity relative to Earth, its orbital period, etc… I simply couldn’t wrap my head around the details of the comet. Needless to say, I was fully hooked on astronomy as a hobby at that moment. I spent the next few weeks agonizingly researching everything I could related to visual astronomy and basic astrophotography possibilities from suburban skies.
Since then, I’ve purchased multiple telescopes for both visual astronomy and astrophotography uses, a stock/unmodified DSLR to begin astrophotography, later upgraded to dedicated astrophotography cameras (one for deep sky objects and one planetary camera), and seemingly spend nearly every minute of my (solo) free-time continuing to learn as much as I can about astronomy.
Enough about me… This website is aimed at beginners as they begin their new hobby doing deep sky astrophotography. Check out the AstroGuides section for information specific to deep sky astrophotography, or click on the Resources/FAQ section for suggestions to learn more about astronomy (general, visual, or astrophotography), answers to FAQ, and a list of acronyms/abbreviations that are common in astronomy and especially astrophotography. Finally, click on the Image Gallery to view some of my best astrophotography images.
Note that this website is created to be static to minimize the hosting costs, as I believe this information should be freely available to reduce additional financial barriers to enter this hobby (which in itself can become expensive very quickly). That said, ads may be allowed/added in the future, but they will only be located at the bottom of the respective page(s) after all relevant information and footnotes have been presented.